Brahmaputra   studies

Northeast India Studies Directory

Mr  Sean Dowdy:

Institution
: University of Chicago
Website
: http://www.prickly-paradigm.com
Post Address
: 5311 S. Harper #3, Chicago, IL 60615 USA
Email
  sdowdy@uchicago.edu
Telephone
  918720905014 (India)
Discipline
: Anthropology (Socio-cultural and Linguistic)
Research topics
in NE India
: Stranger Merchants, Kinship, Semiotics, Inter-Ethnic Gifting, Informal Economy, Particulate History, Account Keeping

Other Interests: The Ahom Kingdom, Highland/Lowland Relations, Cosmology, The Cult of Sukapha
Reference of 3 papers
: Dowdy, Sean. 2010. "The Value of Alterity: Rain Speculation and the Marwari Stranger Merchant." MA Thesis. Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago.

2011. "Adorning the Margins." Margins 1(1). pp. 11-64

in preparation. "Stupid Nonsense: Some Vicissitudes of Verbal Abuse in Urban Assam."

in preparation. "Black Magic in the Black Market: Gift, Schism and Contagion in Assam's Informal Economy."
Additional informations
: I currently live in Guwahati, Assam, where I am conducting fieldwork for my PhD thesis in anthropology at the University of Chicago. My dissertation, provisionally titled "How 'Strangers' Account: Exogeny, Polity, and Particulate History in Assam" explores the political and cultural dynamics of Assam's informal economy through a study of inter-ethnic relations of alliance and alterity. The research primarily focuses on the "Keya-Marwari" merchant community and their political-economic ties to various ethnic communities in Assam. Research is being conducted in Guwahati, Nalbari, Dima-Hasao, Karbi Anglong, and Dhemaji.

I am also a manager for Prickly Paradigm Press in Chicago, IL. In the spirit of the old-time pamphleteer, we publish short, creative, and unstrained pamphlets where authors have free reign to say what is right and wrong about their disciplines and about the world.

Currently, I am also on the editorial team for the recently inaugurated journal, "HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory."

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